Scientists Find New Painkiller From Saliva 398
dptalia writes "Scientists have found a new pain killer based on human saliva. Apparently 1 gram of the new drug provides as much pain blocking as 3 grams of morphine. The drug blocks the breakdown of the body's natural pain killing mechanism. Scientists say the molecule is simple and synthesis is expected to be simple."
Re:Those poor rats (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Going back to the old days? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Those poor rats (Score:4, Insightful)
However I think you will find that man's inhumanity to animals is usually pretty unimaginitive compared with mans inhumanity to man.
Generally you don't have people getting really emotional about hurting animals, not like the way they get all involved in hurting other people.
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
on the other hand, testing something so trivial as make up on an animal doesnt have any ethical justification that i can discern. then there's the sliding scale in between.
No, really, an important point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a friend who is a neuro-oncology researcher. A very large part of her job is: causing cancer in rats, killing those rats, and sectioning their brains. Horror may be in the eye of the beholder, but she does not practice cruelty. The rats are killed by being placed into a box with CO2 (from a dry-ice chamber). That's probably a more peaceful death than I can expect.
Granted, when you are researching pain meds, there's probably going to be pain involved. But that doesn't mean than the researchers get any pleasure out of causing this pain, or that they cause any more pain than necessary.
If you truly feel that a rat life is worth as much as a human life, or that an hour of rat pain is as bad as an hour of human pain, then it is hard to justify your continued existence. Even if you are as green as you can get, and a hard-core vegan, your ecological footprint is very large (certainly compared to a rat), and responsible for the deaths of many small animals. The fact that you use a computer means that your carbon footprint is not that of a primitive hunter-gatherer. If you eat vegetables and/or grains, you are responsible for the deaths of several small mammals (such as fieldmice) and thousands of insects every week, just from the mechanical harvesting process (even assuming that your food is 'organic' and thus pesticide-free.
Re:Indeed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Make it stop! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been on several pain management clinics/programs - the last one being pretty much on the cutting edge of medical stuff (lots of experts trained in new stuff who travel worldwide for conferences about pain management and all). I've been taking morphine several times a day for a few years for chronic pain. It sucks. The side effects suck. But it's the only thing that's given me anything close to a "quality of life".
If it helps to put things in perspective, in the last group (about 20 ppl), when asked if we had honestly thought about ending our lives to make the pain stop, nobody's answered no. Being in excruciating pain each and every second of your life is very hard. You don't get a break when you can't handle it anymore. It's almost like being tortured, and it never ever stops, until the day you die.
It's a very hard thing to live. Hard to get or keep a job too, when almost half the time you're either in too much pain to be useful for anything or taken too much morphine that you're not "all there" anymore. You can't drive when you're taking the stuff either. Half the docs out there see you as an addict or something. And there's the complications and side effects. And when things happen like you catch a cold or gastro and you vomit, then you can't keep down your morphine either, then things start to go REALLY bad. You gotta to to the hospital, and it's not like they'll just give you a shot no questions asked. Your self-esteem is at an all-time low (no work, feeling worthless and a burden, etc). You can't sleep right. It sucks. Your life sucks. If I didn't have kids to look after, I'd likely have committed suicide a couple years ago just to end the pain.
Any new pain management method is a godsend. If I could, I'd volunteer to test this stuff for free (worst case scenario, I die, and the pain ends with it).
That's the daily reality of someone dealing with chronic pain. Morphine isn't just something for addicts and getting high. It makes the lives of millions bearable and worth living. And it's not just for old folks with cancer either - I just turned 30 last month.
Re:Going back to the old days? (Score:4, Insightful)
Make that "a whole store of vague, sometimes contradictory waffle that only intermittently produces results with absolutely no theoretical underpinnings to explain why, how or when it works".
And no-one's quashing anything - if you want to go out on the winter solstice and rub a badger on your varicose veins nobody's stopping you - just don't expect to be able to get it on the National Health Service (or private healthcare, for those countries without a functioning public healthcare system) without the slightest bit of scientific evidence that it's safe and it works.
There are a lot of advances still to be (re-)discovered in traditional herbal and animal lore around the world - of this there is no doubt. Unfortunately there's also a whole load of dangerous horseshit dressed up as traditional lore too, so as a society we don't tend to give credence to a piece of lore until it's been scientifically tested (and ideally until we have some theory as to why it works).
This isn't "quashing" or "destroying" anything - it's called being sensibly prudent. We observe an effect, study it and then use it when we're sure it's safe and effective.
Recall that most of this "store of herbal and animal lore" was discovered by feeding patients a variety of random items and watching for the ones who didn't die horribly from an infection or allergic reaction.
Re:Those poor rats (Score:3, Insightful)
Though many people would seem to be of the opinion that animal life is more important than human life... to them I would suggest that they put "their money where their mouth is" and feed themselves to the nearest pit-bull.
If you (not you eighty4) revere animal life as being so sacred, and consider human life to be as base as it gets, then perhaps you should attempt to remedy that situation by, as I said, feeding yourself to an animal... or is animal life only more important than human life when that human life is not your own?
These are not labs full of megalomaniacs remaniscent of the Joker from Batman, methodically torturing poor kittens and other small furry animals. They're performing scientific tests with as much humanity as they can. The fact that these tests, if performed upon a human, would still be cause for riots and lynching is an unfortunate by-product of the world we live in and the diseases these researchers are trying to cure.
If suddenly it were determined that rats were actually sentient on more than a simple stimulus-response with limited memory, then I'm sure you'd have a LARGE number of researchers who would repent and find another animal whose self-awareness is more in doubt. If you think that this is cruel and calculating, well... in a way... you're right. Welcome to the real world, it's not all rainbows and songbirds.
Re:YES! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be a cat, then.
Re:No, really, an important point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside: I'm not against animal research, but as a former animal researcher who euthanized rodents I have to say that this is a rotten way to kill animals. CO2 euthanasia is not quick, the animals are clearly in distress (they die gasping for air, clawing at the container edges, rolling in their urine and feces). I can only imagine that CO2 has become popular because it sounds nice--you know, you put the animals to sleep with some gas that they breath all the time anyway.
Better by far is cervical dislocation--a quick snap of the neck and the animal falls senseless. Unfortunately, that practice is increasingly viewed as barbaric and is discouraged in many places. It's a strange world we live in where we care less about the actual suffering of the animal than how humane we appear to be.
Re:Make it stop! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Indeed (Score:1, Insightful)
We are fundamentally built to consider ourselves above animals for basic survival reasons. And yes, humans are naturally omnivores, so leave off about the vegetarian options.
You may have a conscience... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but let me assure you that mother nature doesn't.
Can you imagine the pain of being eaten by a large predator? Remember that man's evolutionary ancestors were not always at the top of the food chain; predation has certainly touched you.
Also, the venoms of poisonous animals have evolved to increase pain, allowing the predator to more effectively incapacitate the victim.
Just because mankind removes itself from the sadistic slaughter of the world does not mean that the slaughter itself abates. No matter how violent and predatory we may imagine ourselves to be, we are amateurs compared to what nature has produced.
Re:Indeed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Tai Chi (Score:1, Insightful)
How exactly do you know "first hand" that someone else's pain will disappear if they practice Tai Chi?
It's good to remember that things that are great for one person with one kind of problem are not always guaranteed to solve all other somewhat related problems for all people. That way you can phrase things as helpful suggestions without sounding like a nut-job zealot for whatever remedy you are proposing.
Re:I hope it's psychoactive (Score:3, Insightful)
A drug addict doesn't take drugs to get high, he takes them because he can't tolerate being sober. A person who's problem is only a broken arm or whatever has no problem being sober; he just doesn't want his arm to hurt. When the arm stops hurting, his need for the drug goes away.
Re:Make it stop! (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an easy solution to this problem. Make opiates available on the white market.
Re:Make it stop! (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, overdoses are due to people not knowing the strength of the drug. Measured doses of pharmaceutical heroin would fix that. Drug related crime occurs because people can't afford the black market markup. Pharmaceutical morphine costs pennies a dose to manufacture.
Heroin addiction itself is actually quite benign. It is not toxic to the body, and due to tolerance maintained addicts can function quite well. There's no reason that a person being addicted to heroin should be any more notable than if they were addicted to caffeine. When they don't need to spend all day engaged in drug-seeking behavior addicts can do almost anything a sober person can, such as found Johns Hopkins University [druglibrary.org].
Re:Going back to the old days? (Score:3, Insightful)
Licking wounds is better than no treatment whatsoever, which is what dogs got prior to the invention of medicine.
Medicine can be better than either no treatment *or* licking wounds.
Evolution has given the dogs a set of responses; human ingenuity has come up with better ones, but the dogs still have their responses wired-in. Hence the satellite-dish-head.
Conventional wisdom says that open wounds should be covered and slathered in antibiotics. I've found that my injuries recover more quickly and with less scarring if carefully cleaned and then left open to the air, which might be because I live in a very dry, very high-altitude, very clean environment. But those are a special set of circumstances and I wouldn't advise other people to try this blindly, without experimenting. Ditto dogs licking wounds: it could help, it could hurt, but it's known to be counterproductive to healing up stitched wounds. Don't assume that your results are universally true.
My dog would give her left ovary for cooked carrots.
By the way, about the water: amimal metabolism is the process of converting hydrocarbons and carbohydrates to water and carbon dioxide. When you eat, you need water to provide some of the initial hydrogens that serve as electron donors in the mitochondria, but as soon as you've digested some of the food you start producing water as a waste by-product and that serves to fill your future needs. So, if you eat small amounts, slowly, you don't need to drink as much water, but if you eat a bunch in a rush you'll be thirsty. Same goes with dogs.